Linda McMahon ready to rumble as mega-donor

After dropping $100 million trying unsuccessfully to get herself elected to the Senate, wrestling executive Linda McMahon is trying a new experiment: spending big bucks on other people’s campaigns.

McMahon, whose status as the founder of the WWE pro wrestling franchise made her an irresistible subject for the national media and a rich political target for her Democratic opponents, has reemerged in the world of Republican high-dollar fundraising. Having made hundreds of millions of dollars heading an overwhelmingly male entertainment operation, McMahon is now a rare new female player in the male-dominated world of billionaire political kingpins.

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In 2014, McMahon and her husband, WWE CEO Vince McMahon, have already contributed about $1 million to federal candidates, party committees and super PACs, including Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, the research and tracking group America Rising and TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts’ group Ending Spending, according to a review of public finance records.

McMahon associates don’t expect her to throw as much money into politics as the free-spending Koch brothers or environmentalist Tom Steyer, who have single-handedly funded big, national advocacy groups on the right and left. But the million-dollar donation figure – coming largely in Linda McMahon’s name – is a dramatic uptick in the Connecticut Republican’s giving. Before Linda McMahon entered the political fray herself as a Senate candidate in 2010, the most she and her husband had given to political campaigns was about $30,000 in both 2008 and 2006.

McMahon declined to be interviewed, but she has told fellow Republican elites that she is keen on helping elect other GOP women to office, as well as helping the party compete more seriously in regions of the country where Democrats currently hold a clear upper hand, like McMahon’s home base in New England. She is said to be an ardent admirer of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and has contributed a quarter-million dollars to the Christie-led Republican Governors Association ahead of a competitive gubernatorial race in Connecticut this fall.

Unlike other self-funding candidates who have largely vanished from politics after electoral defeats – California Republican Meg Whitman, for example, who spent upwards of $140 million running for governor in 2010 – McMahon has no intention of getting out of the ring just yet.

“The uptick in her political contributions is representative of the fact that she realizes the challenges that Republican candidates face,” said Chris LaCivita, a Republican consultant who worked on McMahon’s 2012 campaign and has stayed in touch with her.

“Some people are once bitten, twice shy. But Linda McMahon is a tough customer,” he added. “This is somebody who is very concerned about the direction of the country.”

If McMahon has long-range aims in mind for her contributions – nudging the GOP as a whole in a more electorally competitive direction — she has already achieved a shorter-term goal of staying in the mix with a certain class of deep-pocketed conservative power brokers.

Despite her fabulous wealth, McMahon, who is 65, has been shadowed during her political career by lurid stories of excess and exploitation in the world of professional wrestling. Her Democratic opponents attacked her as a Senate candidate for the number of WWE wrestlers who died young from drug overdoses, suicide and other causes. That reputation does not seem to have followed her into the world of political big money.

She has been welcomed into the fold of billionaire donors clustered around New York hedge fund mogul Paul Singer: McMahon attended a December event organized for the Singer-backed joint fundraising committee Friends for an American Majority, which has routed big sums of money to GOP Senate candidates in four states. McMahon again joined Singer and his finance-oriented cohort for a February donor retreat in Aspen, mingling with powerful Washington figures including House Speaker John Boehner.

In that largely male environment, McMahon’s donations have already made her one of the most prolific female givers on the right. In 2012, the top female donor to Republican candidates and groups was Miriam Adelson, the wife of Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson; after her, the next contributor down was New Jersey-based donor Virginia James, who gave $1.5 million the entire cycle.